1 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Are there any scientifically proven personality tests?
Comment by chazwomaq at 12/03/2025 at 17:48 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Psychometry - the science of measuring psychological things - is a field over 100 years old. There are plenty of unscientific personality tests (looking at you Myers-Briggs), but plenty of scientific ones too. One example is The Big Five[1], which is widely used, well validated, and applicable across cultures.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Variants and this model are being developed to this day, as well as tests that look at smaller factors within personality such as psychopathy[2], sociosexuality [3]etc.
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociosexual_Orientation_Inventory
To check whether a personality test is any good, look for things like test-retest reliability, validity of various types, correlations with other tests and real-world behaviours of interest.
Comment by DarwinGhoti at 12/03/2025 at 20:04 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Lots. Many different tests for different purposes.
There's a well developed field of psychology called Psychometrics. It is essentially the measurement of what we call "latent variables", or variables that represent patterns rather than physical objects.
Psychometrics have Three Pillars: Reliability, Validity, and Standardization.
Reliability is the consistency with which we can measure a variable, Validity is how well we measure what we purport to measure, and standardization is how well the measures reflect the population of interest.
Ironically, the most popular personality test (Meyers-Briggs) meets no scientific standards at all. It's free and it intuitively makes sense to people, but the numbers just don't support it, and the underlying organizing principle (Jungian theory) has not been used in practice for years.
Some major tests with well developed numbers:
NEO-PI-R: Well developed test of general (nonclinical) personality based on the Five Factor Theory (the most empirically supported model of personality).
MMPI (different versions for different age ranges): an extensively studied test for clinical populations that have a wide range of primary and secondary scales that are extremely useful in psychodiagnostics
MCMI: a widely used, well supported test of what used to be called "Axis II" functioning, often used in conjunction with the MMPI or PAI
PAI: another widely used clinical measure that is directly mapped to the DSM, which has both advantages and disadvantages
There are literally hundreds of others, some focusing in on very specific things (like combat related trauma functioning or OCD symptoms), and other more generally.
They are also broken in to Objective and Projective categories, but that's a discussion for another day.